“Princess Rosalind, we have a situation here, and we..... need your help” Mawri said, it felt like that was as difficult as pulling teeth without anaesthetic to ask, but for her pack she would do whatever it took. Even if rather than a slice of humble pie she had to devour the entire humble bakery she would do it. As she had always thought the pack came first.

“OK then what’s the situation?” Mibbet asked, suspecting she would soon come to regret asking, but since it had always worked out so far (nobody had been killed, eaten, or sold, and even the hostage situation had been resolved with a little effort on her part. So that had to count for something here right?)

“You may have noticed we are under attack by a human army.”

“Well traditionally an army has the capability to fight their way out of a wet paper bag, and is kinda less self deceiving, but yeah I’d noticed. Any idea what the cause is?”

“They all hallucinate some kind of system, made up of boxes that assign them missions, and one of those “missions” seems to have decided that we are evil and need to be destroyed, or we’ll enslave humanity.”

“And you had no such plans right?”

“Nope, why would we want that, that sort of stupidity leads to our pack being wiped out, why the heck would we want that?” Mawri asked. (Mibbet had to admit she did have a good point there, and also that their tendency to pick other words where a swearword would suffice was kind of cute.)

“True, so what happens when they invade? You clearly can’t leave them randomly attacking or hitting on your citizens right? So how are you dealing with them.”

“We’re containing them carefully so they can’t hurt anybody, including themselves after one decided to charge the portcullis in their undies. We figured they weren’t quite themselves, but we don’t really understand any magic but body enhancement, so we need help to figure out what the heck is going on.”

“OK now that I can help you with, take me to them.”

With a nod Mawri started leading them down to what would usually have been a dungeon, not at the moment. The entire place had been adapted. The bars were wrapped in cushions, there were soft foam weapons lying around everywhere, and the walls and floors were padded several inches thick. All told the entire place looked more like a child’s play area than anything else. Every once in a while a squad of “heroes” would grab their weapons and make a break for the exit, only to be driven back by guards with cushioned shields. Luckily it seemed spells or not the invaders had all the combat prowess of a kitten in knitted booties.

“So let me get this straight, you gave the prisoners weapons?”

“yeah made of foam, we find that if they don’t have any weapons they get more creative about making their own and might do us some actual damage. This way they attack, we drive them back, and if it ever does get genuinely dangerous for a guard they just pretend to be defeated, or rant something about this not being their final form and the prisoners run off. I don’t understand it at all, but if I did I’d be as off the wall as them.”

Mibbet carefully with Rosalind’s assistance examined the spell, this was a really advanced illusion spell. From what she could figure out it made the victims believe the boxes were all powerful, and their missions were absolute. It took advantage of humanities endless capacity to believe anything that had even a smidgen of authority, and used that to make the most useless army ever. The only question was why would you ever want to do that? Mibbet was confused but at least now she had a vague idea what the hell was happening, which had to be better than ten minutes ago.

Mibbet poked and prodded at the system, trying to get more answers, but it wasn’t like the useless thing could actually offer any power at all really, all it did was made a bunch of humans run off and get themselves imprisoned in a sovereign cit......... OH CRAP.

“Are there any other settlements nearby?”

“Well there’s a town called Hawayden a few miles down the road, but we tend to avoid dealing with them as much as possible.”

“Human run?”

“Yups”

“I was afraid of that” Mibbet sighed, she really really really hoped she was wrong with her current theory. But she really didn’t think she was. She prodded at the spell again, doing her absolute best to unravel it. But whoever had cast this, they knew what they were doing. Trying to unravel it was like trying to pick the lock on a high security vault using a pair of hatpins. It just wasn’t happening, not even if she was a master of the craft, and given that her specialisation was high pressure water magic she reckoned poking around in peoples brains was probably going to end poorly. “You may want to step up security at the gates, in case your dear neighbours get any ideas.”

“Ideas from that lot? That would be a first, they’re human supremacists.” Snickered Mawri, as somewhere in her head a penny finally dropped. (Of course by the time it did so it must have accumulated enough interest to be a gold sovereign, but in all fairness to Mawri this plan didn’t exactly seem to be the most straightforward.) “Oh PUDDLES, you think they plan to use this confinement as an excuse to justify invasion of the city?”

“I wouldn’t put it past somebody who could create this kind of spell to use any ends to justify the means. The mind control is completely twisted. It has measures in place in case you mess with it, and I don’t wanna turn somebodies brain into putty just because they were unlucky enough to get cursed.”

“So how do we break the spell?”

“We don’t”

“Wait, what? I can’t just abandon my pack to an invasion like that.”

“Let me finish,” Mibbet replied. “A spell this advanced we can’t break the magic, so we’ve got to break the caster.”